They say that if you want to catch fish, you gotta go where the fishermen ain't. My philosophy: You have to get your inspiration from places others don't or won't. Few things are worse than the parroting of wisdom received from folks who aren't all that wise. Also, this blog has a kind of cool acronym.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Face it: The number of employees who wake up in the morning and say, “My company’s reputation is a chief decision variable for what I’m going to post online today” is very small. (If you are the type to visit this site regularly, you are probably a member of this tiny group. Congratulations.) This is something that no policy will change — and it takes vast amounts of arrogance to think it will.

The way mechanisms and institutions of control attempt to come to terms with online communities is a passion of mine.

Tuesday, April 09, 2013

Post-publication, I had an additional thought about the SEC's recent "Netflix Patch" with regard to fair disclosure of material information on social media.

It's easy for folks to look at this announcement as the death of the wire services. But here's one thing those services offer that, say, an IR blog or a corporate Facebook account does not: data integrity. You transmit that earnings announcement on a wire service and, short of an additional transmission, you can't really modify what you've said--that toothpaste has left the tube. You put up a Tweet, it can be deleted. A Facebook post can be modified. It takes more sophistication than the average investor has to determine what occurred to the original post. There isn't a lot of confidence, then, that what you saw was the same thing that someone else did.

Still, I don't really expect this advantage to last very long. Just as we have certificate authorities for domain validation and such, I could see something similar for certifying the reliability and permanence of content on a company's owned and social Web presences.

On April 2, 2013 (a date perhaps chosen to avoid a misunderstanding), the SEC issued clarification about social media’s role in disclosure.
This was in response to a controversial Facebook post by Netflix CEO
Reed Hastings, who posted the achievement of a business milestone on
Facebook. This sparked renewed debate about the topic of what
constitutes “disclosure” on the social Web.

The intersection of online citizenship, corporate communications, and regulatory pressures represents the most exciting area of our industry today.

Business in the information age is, in large part, governed by
Industrial Age rules intended to restrain J.D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan
and so on — bit-and-byte realities wrestling with concrete and steel
legacies. It will prove interesting to see these laws and policies
applied to corporate social media governance.

Even if a company did not create a “don’t act stupid” policy, it could
easily fire or discipline its employees for posting inappropriate photos
to Facebook or disclosing proprietary information on Twitter.
Employees, in turn, should know that their conduct in public – including
social media accounts visible to outsiders – can expose them to career
repercussions.

Monday, December 10, 2012

The post on Facebook was available immediately to over 200,000 subscribers to Hastings’ Facebook account. It is also not clear how many of these subscribers are Netflix investors or equity analysts. It is clear however that posting on Facebook removes any advantage for the equity analysts and professional traders who monitor the press releases closely.

If the SEC goes forward with this action against Netflix, it will signal that they are trying to restrict, not expand the sources that investors have for obtaining information about companies. This is exactly the opposite of what they should be doing.

Netflix monthly viewing exceeded 1 billion hours for the first time ever in June.

I'm no expert in securities law, but it seems to me that the case for materiality here is fairly weak.

An analyst mentions in the related Reuters piece that this post caused the stock to go up from $70 to $80 that day, so of course it was "material". I see at least three things wrong with this argument.

First, if the market's reactions were, alone, the test for materiality, then no one would say anything, anywhere, ever, about their business aside from turgid press releases and regulatory filings.

Second, I suppose any analysts who are crying foul are doing so because A) they were caught not paying attention, or B) the information was not disclosed in a less public and slightly more ephemeral forum that analysts tend to access... like, say, an earnings call, for example.

Third, the fact that Netflix was about to breach the billion-hour-per-month mark should not have come as any surprise to anyone who reads the very public, no-Facebook-account-required Netflix blog.

What this drives home is the fact that the regulatory agencies still run things based on rules meant to restrain the likes of Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and the like. Any adaptations and modernizations have amounted to just so many crufty, hastily applied patches.

Friday, March 09, 2012

Lawmakers are tiptoeing around issues that could tick off tech heavyweights such as Google or Amazon. They don’t want a legislative misstep to trigger the same kind of online revolt that killed the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate in January.

Good.

Given the choice between a powerful government and a powerful technology community engaged in free enterprise, I'll take the latter.

Reminded of the Thomas Jefferson quote: "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."

Monday, May 31, 2010

Over at the old blog, I wrote that the news media, despite its problems with its business model, should not seek help from the government. To do so would be to bring American media to the level of countries we rightly criticize.

I continue to follow this topic with interest, noting during breaks in the Memorial Day celebrations that Mark Tapscott and Jeff Jarvis have published their similar positions, warning of the dangers of FTC involvement in journalism.

Tapscott outlines the issue succintly:

Journalists must understand that there is no way the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of the press will survive if the federal government regulates the news industry. Those who accept at face value protests to the contrary or the professions of pure intentions by advocates of government takeover of the news business are, at best, incredibly naive.

Journalists who remain silent or apathetic about what is being prepared for their profession become unintentional accessories in the strangulation of independent journalism.

Journalists who support or assist, for any reason, the FTC process are accomplices in the strangulation of independent journalism.

I'd love to be able to say that there's nothing to worry about, since heavy government involvement in the news media wouldn't survive a Constitutional test. Unfortunately, all branches of government—and, more damnably, the citizens they supposedly serve—appear to care little about the powerful restraints on government power this founding document describes.

They say that citizens in a democracy get the government they deserve. As to the journalism we deserve? There's one word for a government-controlled media: propaganda.

Many of those who have spoken with FTC investigators say they appear to be building a case that Google's purchase of AdMob would harm mobile-applications developers. Under that theory, the companies that create programs that appear on the iPhone and other handheld devices would have fewer mobile ad networks to choose from when trying to make their work pay.

If that is the FTC's case, then the fact that so many developers are publicly opposing a challenge to the deal could pose a problem for the agency. What's more, many of the bloggers have been unflattering about the FTC investigators with whom they have spoken, something Google could use in its defense.

What I'm convinced regulators do understand is the PR value of big, meaty, publicity-significant targets that allow it to tell other companies "We're watching." In many ways, even after closing the investigation, the FTC probably accomplished all that it originally set out to do.

Code Of Conduct

Comments here are unmoderated and are operated on a use-until-abused basis. I will adopt a moderation policy if I feel that my visitors abuse this privilege.

I will delete any comment that is lewd, crude, lascivious, racist, sexist, libelous, off-topic, or injurious to the privacy of a non-public individual. Such users will be forever banned from commenting on this site.

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